Artworld Talk: Performance as Repair
Sara Reisman, Nato Thompson, and Faith Wilding,
Moderated by Stephanie Bailey
Sunday, December 9, 2018
from 2:30 to 3:30pm
at Art Basel Miami Beach
Miami Beach Convention Center Auditorium, West Lobby
1901 Convention Center Drive, Miami Beach, FL
[Image Description: Four panelists sit on a gray-brown stage on blue chairs with white legs and armrests. There are two white tables with glasses in front of the panelists and black monitor speakers in the foreground. The backdrop is a large white wall where the words “Art | Basel” and “Conversations” can be read. To the far top left a projected image can be partially viewed.]
As part of Art Basel Miami Beach’s Conversations series on topics concerning the global contemporary art scene, Performance as Repair included Rubin Foundation Director Sara Reisman, Sueyun and Gene Locks Artistic Director, Philadelphia Contemporary, Philadelphia, Nato Thompson, and Artist, and Co-chair, Visual Art Program, Vermont College of Fine Arts, Providence, Faith Wilding, moderated by Editor-in-Chief, Ocula, London/Hong Kong, Stephanie Bailey. The panel examined ‘the performative role of language in our society'; what role performance art can play in this field; whether the medium reflects the growth of public interest in social activism; and how the artworld responds to the growing role of participatory civil action in both artists’ practices and the public sphere.
Bios
Born and raised in Hong Kong, Stephanie Bailey is Editor-in-Chief of Ocula Magazine, contributing editor to ART PAPERS and LEAP, curator of Conversations at Art Basel in Hong Kong, and a Naked Punch editorial committee member. Between 2012 and 2017, Bailey worked as managing and senior editor of Ibraaz, an online forum for visual culture in and around North Africa and the Middle East, and now serves as managing editor for the online journal for M+ Museum in Hong Kong, Podium. She also writes for Artforum International, Art Monthly, Di’van: A Journal of Accounts, and Yishu Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, and between 2009 and 2012, directed a BTEC-accredited Foundation Diploma in Art and Design at Doukas School in Athens, Greece.
Sara Reisman is the Executive and Artistic Director of the Shelley & Donald Rubin Foundation which is focused on supporting art and social justice through grant making to organizations and exhibitions at The 8th Floor. Recent exhibitions include In the Power of Your Care, Enacting Stillness, The Intersectional Self, The Schoolhouse and the Bus, featuring works by Pablo Helguera and Suzanne Lacy, and The Supper Club, a solo exhibition by Elia Alba. From 2008 to 2014, Reisman was the director of New York City’s Percent for Art program where she commissioned permanent artworks by artists including Xu Bing, Pablo Helguera, Karyn Olivier, Ester Partegas, and Mary Mattingly, among others, for civic sites like libraries, public schools, courthouses, plazas, and parks. Reisman has worked in a curatorial capacity in organizations including the Queens Museum of Art (2008), the New Museum (2005-2006), and the Philadelphia ICA (2004-2005). Reisman was the 2011 Critic-in-Residence at Art Omi, and a 2013 Marica Vilcek Curatorial Fellow, awarded by the Foundation for a Civil Society. Reisman has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Purchase College, and since 2016, the School of Visual Arts’ Curatorial Practice Masters Program.
Nato Thompson is a curator and author and works as The Sueyun and Gene Locks Artistic Director at Philadelphia Contemporary. Philadelphia Contemporary is a mobile contemporary art organization in the process of creating a non-collecting museum in the city of Philadelphia. He recently curated the Festival for the People as well as a solo artist commission by painter Jane Irish. Previous to Philadelphia Contemporary, he worked at the New York-based public art organization Creative Time as Artistic Director which he joined in January 2007. Since then, Thompson has organized such major Creative Time projects as The Creative Time Summit (2009–2015), Pedro Reyes’ Doomocracy (2016), Kara Walker’s A Subtlety (2014), Living as Form (2011), Trevor Paglen’s The Last Pictures (2012), Paul Ramírez Jonas’s Key to the City (2010), Jeremy Deller’s It is What it is (2009, with New Museum curators Laura Hoptman and Amy Mackie), Democracy in America: The National Campaign(2008), and Paul Chan’s Waiting for Godot in New Orleans (2007), among others. Previously, he worked as Curator at MASS MoCA, where he completed numerous large-scale exhibitions, including The Interventionists: Art in the Social Sphere (2004) with a catalogue distributed by MIT Press. He has written two books of cultural criticism, Seeing Power: Art and Activism in the 21st Century (2015) and Culture as Weapon: The Art of Influence in Everyday Life published in January 2017.
Faith Wilding born in Colonia Primavera, Paraguay,1943; emigrated to the US in 1961. Wilding is an intermedia artist, writer, and educator. BA (Honors, Comparative Literature), University of Iowa, Iowa City (1968); MFA (Performance/ Installation/ Feminist Art), California Institute of the Arts (1973). Wilding is Professor Emerita of Performance Art/Critical Studies at SAIC (2002-2011). Visiting Scholar, Pembroke Center, Brown University, Providence, RI (2011-2016); Graduate Faculty MFA-V, VCFA (1992-present). Co-initiator of the feminist art movement in Southern California, chronicled in her book By Our Own Hands (Double X, Los Angeles,1976); author of many essays on feminist art and art history including in The Power of Feminist Art, (Abrams,1995).
Wilding’s work addresses the recombinant and distributed bio-tech body in 2D media, audio, video, digital media, installations, and performances. Wilding’s retrospective “Fearful Symmetries” (Threewalls, Chicago, 2014, Pasadena Armory, (2015). Exhibitions: Fiber: Sculpture; WACK! Art and the Feminist Revolution; Sexual Politics, and Division of Labor: Women’s Work in Contemporary Art and re-Act Feminism, Berlin.
Wilding co-founded and collaborates with subRosa, a cyberfeminist cell of cultural producers using Bio-Art and tactical feminist performance in the public sphere to explore and critique the intersections of information and biotechnologies in women’s bodies, lives, and work. Publications include: Domain Errors! Cyberfeminist Practices! (Autonomedia, 2003); and numerous artist books, map works. http://www.cyberfeminism.net/
Awards & Grants: Art Matters (2015) WCA Life-time Achievement Award (2014), Guggenheim Fellow (2009); Creative Capital grant (with subRosa) (2003-05); NEA artist fellowships (1987, 1989, 1998). www.faithwilding.refugia.net